Surely there is good news for pro-lifers and unborn children everywhere.  We have a president who will right the moral wrongs of previous generations and restore the justice and equality of our founding principles to American public policy.  He has said so himself. 

Don’t be fooled by our new President’s swift, off-camera contribution of our tax dollars to foreign abortionists last Friday.  He is passionately devoted to the well-being of future generations:  “Let it be said by our children’s children that…with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.” (Inaugural address)

Lest you infer from his self-purported eagerness to ratify the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) that President Obama would use government to actively foment abortion abroad, fear not.  He respects the “broader principle:  that government should not intrude on our most private family matters.” (Jan 22, 2009)

Should you read alliance of power into then-State-Senator Obama’s cooperation with Illinois Planned Parenthood to prevent any factor (like the young age of the mother or the advanced age of the baby) from hindering access to abortion, take heart:  In his inaugural address our fair-minded president reminded us that “a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.” 

If you are dismayed that President Obama approves of the Supreme Court’s (Roe v. Wade – 1973) denial of personhood to the unborn, in order to justify withholding their basic human rights, remember what has become known as Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech. Remember that he rejects this shameful ruse as it was once used to deny blacks their freedom.  Remember how movingly he denounced the injustice of  “legalized discrimination,” and “opportunity…systematically constricted,” and “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” Remember how he concluded that we must “insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life.”

Surely a man who opposes the abuse of power and State intrusion into private matters cannot condone government taking the side of the enfranchised against the helpless.  Surely a man with a particular cultural sensitivity to the ploys the powerful will use to protect their dominance cannot use those same tactics against others. 

Surely as he crisscrossed the country, this righteous man did not fail to notice the popular bumper sticker “Everyone who supported slavery was free.  Everyone who supports abortion was born.  That is how oppression works.”

Surely a man privileged to have “gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations” can put two and two together. 

Surely.

No organization that promotes or even condones abortion can justly claim either to represent the best interests of women, or to protect them from violence or discrimination.  Abortion is violence against women, and any culture, government or policy that tolerates it discriminates against them.

That abortion is bad for women - physically, emotionally or socially - is not the best reason to oppose the vile practice.  To argue this case may be seen to be sacrificing the moral high ground.  Abortion is properly rejected as a moral rather than a practical issue.  It is wrong because of what it does to the baby, irrespective of its effects on the mother.

Nevertheless, there are two good reasons to make this argument.  The first is pragmatic:  If practical considerations can save more lives than moral arguments, then the only moral course is to further the practical one. It would be criminal to allow more babies to be killed because they weren’t to be saved for the “right” reasons.

The second is political:  the inherent corruption of the progressive agenda should be highlighted whenever possible in order to undermine it.  The hypocrisy of the left is nowhere more evident than in its relentless promotion of abortion at all costs – costs borne primarily by women.

By routinely rejecting or simply ignoring studies that suggest links between abortion and negative health consequences for the mother, many supposed advocates for women reveal that their true advocacy is for abortion itself, not for the women affected by it.

There is reasonable medical data to implicate abortion in physical heath risks to women including:  pain; hemorrhage and infection; complications related to anesthesia; infertility or difficulty in carrying later pregnancies to term; higher rates of heart disease; increased incidence of breast cancer; and septic shock.

Women’s mental health is at issue as well.  Numerous studies have connected abortion with subsequent guilt and depression, anxiety, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, and post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD). 

Yet, the abortion community rejects all of these links out of hand.  Pro-abortion voices argue that all such studies are flawed. But try as they may to ignore the issue, some cases of individual harm are irrefutable, like the recent suicide of a young British artist (specifically over her guilt at having succumbed to outside pressure to abort her twins) and the latest septic shock deaths attributed to the abortion pill RU-486. 

When forced to acknowledge these cases, abortion lobbyists will claim that far more women are harmed by clandestine, “unsafe” abortions than by the supposedly risk-free, sterile, modern medical procedure they advocate.

But this is not the case. An abortion by its very nature cannot be inconsequential to a woman’s body. The usual method of achieving one involves the violation of her body by a surgical instrument.  And a chemical abortion throws the body into a violent upheaval.  In even the easiest cases, mifeprex (the Plan B abortion pill) causes side effects like nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue, headaches, dizziness, breast tenderness, vomiting and diarrhea. In many places where abortion is legal, like in Russia, women carrying viable fetuses are routinely aborted by injecting them with prostaglandins that provoke a painful miscarriage.

And even if the percentage of immediate or dramatic complications to the mother is reduced by the legality of abortion, the vastly increased number of procedures being performed under the shelter of legality increases the total number of women suffering harm.

In any case, people who advocate the taking of human life are by definition not the most reliable judges of harm.  Does no one question the wisdom of entrusting women’s health to people who regard human life as a mass of disposable tissue?

At the very least, when they argue that policy should not be made on a few potential extreme cases, pro-abortion forces are trying to have it both ways.  The percentage of abortions “necessary” for rape or incest is minute, yet this worst-case scenario is habitually used to deflect any attempt to limit the availability of abortion.

Even if we accepted that only a small percentage of women who have abortions suffer mental or physical harm from doing so, there are so many abortions that this is quite a number of women. 

Again, they will have it both ways.  The actual number of women harmed by so-called “back-alley abortions” is infinitesimal compared to the millions of young lives sacrificed to protect against this possibility.

In any case, whether those harmed are many or few, all of them are women.

Women suffer at both ends of the procedure, as far more than half of the babies aborted around the world are female, particularly in certain regions.

Female babies are singled out for abortion.  This harsh truth puts women’s groups in an uncomfortable position.  They must condemn sex-selection by abortion, but on what grounds can they do so? It is the height of hypocrisy to demand that women be able to do anything they want with “their bodies” and then complain when they abort girls.  Are they girls, or are they the mother’s body?  Fortunately for them, liberals specialize in eating their cake and having it too.

Of course, female fetuses are girls, often targeted for destruction specifically because they are girls.  UNICEF calculates that India alone loses around 7,000 girls every day by abortion. 

It seems that women are not the issue.  Abortion is the issue.

When abortion on demand is the goal, the psychological state of the mother with regard to her pregnancy is an important factor to consider.  By including mental health in the “health of the mother” exception to limits by gestational age of the fetus, abortion advocates succeed in getting viable fetuses aborted at the mother’s request. If protecting women were the real goal, the mother’s psychological state related to an abortion would also be taken into account.

When abortion on demand is the goal, abortion rights groups push the bounds of legality and common sense to protect women from “pressure” to give birth – pressure from parents, from men, from pro-life groups.  If protecting women were the goal, studies showing that most women who undergo abortion feel pressured to do so would demand action.

If protecting women were the goal, policies that relieve men of all responsibility for the pregnancies that they contribute to creating would never be considered. 

Feminists insist that the right to decide whether or not to abort increases women’s power in society.  But it is precisely the abortion culture that turns pregnancy into “a woman’s problem.”  The existence of abortion as a “choice” puts de facto pressure on a pregnant woman to become – by an often painful, wrenching and even dangerous procedure - something other than what she is: a woman who is carrying a child inside her body as a result of sexual intercourse with a man. 

Whose interests are really being furthered?

Individuals strive in vain to live according to what they do believe as long as the government will tell them what they must believe – what they will be allowed to believe.  

The Nanny we let in the door is no longer satisfied with telling us what is politically correct, nor even with making sure we comply.  She has determined to make us say we like it – that we believe she was right all along.

She told us we must all get along and play nicely together. To help clarify her meaning, she generously legislated what we could do or say - to or about whom, and under what circumstances.  

But it turned out that some people were following the basic rules without submitting to the ideology behind them.  This will no longer do.  Recent court decisions, legislation and bureaucracy from around the globe are illustrative:  Nanny wants our thinking in line with her own.

To this end, the definition of discrimination has been redefined, at least in the case of homosexuality, to include the failure to actively promote, as evidenced by California legislation SB 777, which went into effect the first of this year.  

British foster parents Vincent and Pauline Matherick found this out last fall when social services forcibly removed a boy from their care for their refusal to sign the government’s Sexual Orientation Regulations.  These require caregivers to instruct preadolescents in the benefits of alternative sexuality.  That the Christian couple had never acted in a discriminatory way towards any individual was irrelevant.  Having admitted to the thought crime of disapproving of homosexuality, they were of no further use to the State.  International uproar and a law suit eventually led local social services to settle for a signature on a compromise document, but not before showing who was boss.  

Massachusetts parents who don’t care to introduce homosexuality to their 5 and 6 year olds will have it done for them by the State by way of “diversity book bags” or reading material depicting gay romantic leads.  The Federal Appeals Court, ruling against parents who wished to “opt out” of this service, admitted that the elementary school named in the suit chose books like “King and King” with the express purpose of influencing youngsters in ideological matters, but asserted that this did not constitute indoctrination but rather a “legitimate state interest.”  The weasel wording belies the belief that indoctrination IS a legitimate state interest.

The half a dozen ACLU lawyers who helped represent the school are so emboldened by the judicial activism they routinely encounter that they no longer feel any need to pretend that actual diversity – diversity of belief – will be tolerated.   One of them openly stated that it was “a tremendous bonus” for children to be exposed to things their parents don’t approve of.  The court agreed, despite the existence of the Massachusetts Parental Notification Act, which acknowledges parents’ rights to direct the moral upbringing of their own children, and provides a means for opting out of classes that treat issues of human sexuality. For resisting, one of the boys concerned was beaten up by several of his schoolmates on the playground, and the plaintiff father was jailed overnight.  Nanny recommends submission.

A German Baptist family who refused to enroll their children in public schools where their beliefs were not represented was forced to ring in the New Year by fleeing to England after the mayor of their town tried to seize custody of their children. The European Court of Human Rights has come down on the side of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court, which has repeatedly ruled against home schoolers, stressing “the general interest of society to avoid the emergence of parallel societies based on separate philosophical convictions.”

Spanish parents find themselves in a similar situation. Though the Spanish Constitution explicitly includes language guaranteeing the right of parents to choose the education of their children, the courts uphold government initiatives that blatantly usurp this right.  When a new course – Education for Citizenry – was mandated for 9th graders this year, many parents and schools were outraged at the overtly agnostic, relativist and gender ideology it sought to impart.  When individual parents in the region of Catalonia removed their children from the classroom, the regional High Court ruled that they had no right to objection of conscience.  One Catholic foundation that runs several prestigious schools throughout the country has refused to teach the class.  The Catalan government has responded by taking the Barcelona school to court to have its accreditation rescinded. The government has won every step to date.

Mistress will not take “no” for an answer.

Unsurprisingly, the harshest judgmental wrath unleashed on Nickelodeon star Jamie Lynn Spears (Zoey 101) for getting pregnant at 16 came not from those conservatives or religious types inevitably portrayed as intolerant by liberal commentators, but from those selfsame liberal voices.

This young girl learned the hard way the dangers of holding a mirror up to a social progressive.  By actually becoming pregnant from sexual intercourse - have we not progressed our way beyond this nasty side effect? - she has made the irresponsibility of the "progressive" agenda a physical reality for all to see.  For this crime, Huffington Post bloggers - most of them women - have pounced on the girl and her mother with claws bared.

Bonnie Fuller self-rightiously condemns Lynne Spears for failing to "instill personal values and self-esteem" in her daughters, who must get "knocked up" because they "choose men who have so little respect for them that they're not careful about preventing a pregnancy."  Of course Ms. Fuller's own daughters won't be so "careless" and "messed up" because they will surely get "the talk...about the dangers of unprotected sex."

"You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts." This nugget of common sense is credited to former US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey.  Nonetheless, if people can’t have their own facts, they can decide which facts to consider, and folks turn out to have a strong preference for data that confirms their beliefs combined with an unerring ability to ignore conflicting data.  It could be that this selective data processing is sometimes an oversight.  Not everyone is a social scientist.

I would like to believe that Pete Wehner and Yuval Levin, posting on the state of American society at commentarymagazine.com fall into the oversight category.  Be that as it may, their failing grade in elementary statistics fuels the wrong conclusions from people with an axe to grind.

 Andrew Sullivan responds hopefully to their optimistic post with conclusions that are no more than wishful thinking on his part.  As inconvenient as the raw data may be to our modern lifestyles, it will not be bent to suggest that what Sullivan calls the 1950s family model does not remain the standard to beat.  He headlines his remarks “Slouching Away from Gomorrah.”  He might better have titled them “Slouching Away from the Relevant Data.”

Sullivan raises a question that seems to be suggested by the data Wehner and Levin present:  If rates of measurable social/cultural ills (drug use, crime, abortion) are falling while traditional family structure continues to unravel, mightn’t previous arguments blaming social problems on de-structured families be flawed?  Worse than simply mixing apples and oranges, the possibilities he posits (perhaps childbirth outside marriage is not necessarily a bad thing, etc) make a veritable fruit salad.

These individual groups of data (overall crime rate and drug use down, raw numbers down on abortion, generally improved school performance, divorce rates down among the college-educated but increasing in other groups, increasing out-of-wedlock births, co-habitation on the rise) can easily be simultaneously true without having any relation whatsoever to one another. Co-relation is not implication.  If YouTube visits increase over a period in which crime rates fall, should we conclude that potential criminals are online rather than on the street?

Of course, it would be equally unfair for social conservatives to take unrelated data on increasing crime and increasing illegitimacy and blame the former on the latter.  Though this may sometimes be done, it is not necessary to make fruit salad to relate de-structured families to social ills.  Any number of social science studies that do control for the separate issues directly relate them.  Wehner and Levin ignore the data most relevant to their article, and Sullivan’s commentary suggests that he doesn’t find it lacking.

That crime rates are down while illegitimacy is up is irrelevant to the question of whether illegitimacy breeds crime.  The only crime data with any bearing on that question concerns how the particular children in question – those born out of wedlock - compare to children raised by both of their own, married parents.  And in fact, the first group is twice as likely to fall into delinquency than the second, after controlling for factors such as income and education.  

Similarly, the two authors cite data that drug use is down lately, but ignore the fact that whatever the generalized level of drug use-abuse in the culture at large, the numbers are much lower still within married families (both married parents and their teens are more abstemious).

Statistics do not address each individual case on its own merits, and there certainly are examples of newfangled families that turn out fabulously. But the relevant data clearly shows that on average, children raised by both of their married parents will be more physically and emotionally healthy, will do better and go further in school and later earn more money in better jobs, will be less likely to be incarcerated, less likely to be victims of abuse in the home or of crime outside of it, less likely to have children out of wedlock, less likely to live in poverty, less likely to use or abuse alcohol or drugs of any kind, and less likely to wind up divorced themselves than children raised in single parent or step-family situations.

Regardless of what modern adults might want for ourselves, that 50s family is the one that works best for children.  In matters of social policy and individual family dynamics, children cannot speak for themselves.  The data speaks for them, if we will only consider it dispassionately.

Data sources from the book Why Marriage Matters: 26 Conclusions from the Social Sciences

Arguing with liberals is ineffective not least because we don’t speak the same language.  The liberal lexicon either excludes or redefines so many words as to render communication impossible.  What follow are just a few of the words that provoke a vacant stare in a liberal. An exhaustive list would be too exhausting.

A - Aberration: As nothing can be affirmed as right or true, nothing can stray or deviate from that norm.  Anything goes.

B - Benefit:  Redefined as “right.”

C - Consequence:  Liberal tunnel vision allows for only one idea at a time.  There are no consequences to actions, only new opportunities to legislate away any perceived inconveniences.

D – Defense:  As others only become aggressive towards us as a natural response to our bad, non-liberal behavior, if we would just be nicer to everyone around the world – sign their treaties, join their clubs - America would need no defense.
 
E – Evil:  This concept was introduced by killjoy religions. Everyone is basically good (except conservative Christians).

F - Female:  There are no sexes, only socially constructed genders. We can overcome such outdated concepts through medicine, re-education, and, of course…legislation.

G - God:  No one smarter or more empowered to impose his will on his environment than a secular liberal can be conceived of.

H - Hypocrisy:  Apes don’t notice that they are naked either.

I - Incongruous:  As there is no standard against which to judge any new idea, liberal positions logically conflict with one another. 

J - Judiciary:  Redefined as last-ditch legislators.

K - Kill:  Anything that comes after “thou shalt not…” smacks of oppression.

L - Limit:  Liberals will not be bound by anything external to their own desires.  Nature itself cannot hold them back.

M - Morals:  More non-binding social constructs party-poopers invent to hinder progress.

N - Never:  All options are open.

O - Objective:  They can’t see past their own perception.

P - Philosophy:  One is as good as another, and the easiest one is none at all.

Q - Questions:  Liberals only have answers.

R - Responsibility:  Only rights apply to people who are the center of their own universe.

S  - Should/Shouldn’t:  Liberals only understand “can” and “can’t.”

T - Truth:  What the meaning of “is” is.

U - Underage:  The only thing 11-year-olds are too young to do is smoke, but the rest of us aren’t allowed to do that anymore either.

V - Value: Nothing is intrinsic.  (In any case, the only “V” word liberals know is “victim”).

W - Wish:  Liberals have no wishes, only legislation that has yet to be pushed through.

X - Xenophobia:  Liberals only hate America.

Y - You:  Me first.

Z - Zealot:  Redefined to mean anyone who believes in anything permanent.




 


 

Secular liberals are so offended that some people insist on living according to fixed moral precepts that they want it outlawed. That they cannot see the irony in their position reveals their lack of a reference point against which to measure anything.

This latest tantrum follows Pope Benedict XVI’s exhortation to Catholic pharmacists to follow their conscience in carrying out their work.  Though individual people (usually pro-life Christians) called “renegade pharmacists” by NARAL have been refusing for years to distribute abortifacient methods of birth control, secularists get another chance to feign indignation after the Pope’s October 29th remarks.  

No matter that he did not address these comments to the general public, but rather to Roman Catholic pharmacists:  Adults who have willingly chosen to put themselves under his tutelage.

The Pope did not impose his will on anyone, nor even tell anyone what to think.  Catholic pharmacists, like Catholic firefighters, Catholic bankers and Catholic gardeners, believe human life to be inviolable. They share this belief with the Bishop of Rome, not “because he says so”, but because it is part-and-parcel of their faith.

As it is common knowledge - especially among pharmacists -that the essential purpose of some “medicines” is to intentionally end human life, it should not be difficult – even for a liberal - to see the contradiction for a Catholic to dispense such products.

People who lack a stable definition of “conscience” misunderstand objection of conscience as a philosophical  concept.

Secular activists would not only withhold a legal haven for such moral objections (such legislation is under consideration in several states), they would actively penalize them (as is already the case in several others).  NARAL president, Nancy Keenan, projected her aggressive position onto pro-life legislators, claiming “politicians should be supporting personal responsibility and personal freedom, not empowering those who try to impose their ideological values on women.”   Indeed.

Who’s ideological values are imposed on whom when people who object to an action on moral grounds are forced by the government to perform it?  

It is not only unjust to require people of faith to separate their component parts (this is my Catholic self; this is my pharmacist self; this is my parent self; my spouse self; etc.), but compliance is impossible.  

One’s religious philosophy cannot help but inform his day-to-day acts, not only those limited to the strictly “religious sphere.” Perhaps, having no personal philosophy themselves, secularists mistake religion for a mere form of entertainment, a leisure-time occupation for others, something that can be left at the door of church like they leave their tennis rackets at their health clubs.

This is not a Christian’s understanding of faith.  Pope Paul VI, in the post-Conciliar (1964) Lumen Gentium, encouraged Catholic faithful to live according to their beliefs “remembering that in every temporal affair they must be guided by a Christian conscience. For it must be admitted that the temporal sphere is governed by its own principles, since it is rightly concerned with the interests of this world. But that ominous doctrine which attempts to build a society with no regard whatever for religion, and which attacks and destroys the religious liberty of its citizens, is rightly to be rejected.”

To mandate that all participate in the choices of some is precisely to attack and destroy the religious liberty of those who would abstain.  Terrified that anyone might take a cue from “men in Rome,” secular liberals will have us all ruled instead by “women in Washington.”  As usual,  these misguided souls turn out to be the very evil they denounce.  It’s not their fault:  They can’t tell north from south.

In an attempt to remind us of the complexity of the abortion issue in the US today, George Will winds up oversimplifying it.  He elucidates the current legal situation as if there were nothing more to it.

In his column “Supreme Control of Abortion Policy,” Mr. Will rightly points out that even pro-life’s best case scenario - the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision - would not outlaw abortion, but only return the issue to state legislatures, some of which would presumably adopt legislation similar to the federal rules now in place.

As the most a president can do is to choose justices who then might overturn Roe, Mr. Will convincingly deems presidents relatively powerless to determine abortion policy. Therefore, he reasons, a presidential candidate’s position on the issue is relevant only insofar as it signifies “the candidate's sensibilities and sympathies, and … his or her notion of sound constitutional reasoning.”  And that’s that. Any change would be slow and incomplete, so no one should get too worked up about any candidate’s view one way or the other.  Is the issue really no more complex than this?
 
First of all, that a candidate should consider Roe vs. Wade badly decided is more of a one-step IQ test than it is an indicator of his “sensibilities.”  Even if one accepts the dubious notion of a constitutional right to “privacy,” to stretch the concept to include abortion is to debase its very meaning. To expand the boundaries of my privacy to overtake your body entirely is to effectively negate your privacy.

But not everyone who rejects judicial activism respects life from the moment of conception.  And certainly many defenders of life care less about the Constitution than they do about babies.  The anti-Roe/anti-abortion and pro-Roe /pro-abortion alliances are politically rather than intellectually necessary.

There is much more to the question of abortion than its legal parameters. More than simply changing the law, the Court’s aggressive intervention wrested at one fell swoop a moral question from its proper arena.  And most importantly of all, it armed to the teeth one side over the other.

Without the bulletproof armor of a constitutional “right” to protect them, abortion advocates would again have to advance their cause on its own merits – or lack thereof.  Though no court of men could ever be endowed with the power to either grant or withhold anyone’s “right” to kill an innocent, the pro-abortion side simultaneously wields this phony right like a weapon and hides behind it like a shield.

Depriving post-Roe abortion supporters of this key weapon in their arsenal would do a lot to restore the even playing field of ideas, from which no battle over social policy should ever have strayed.

Tracey O’Donnell
SwimmingUpstream.org

To object to California’s latest legislative attack on individual conscience (SB 777, AB 394 and AB 14) on the grounds that homosexuals are “perverts” is a position that is neither properly conservative, nor properly Christian.  Conservatives empower people and not government, and Christians abhor sin but not sinners.  

That said, there are plenty of solid reasons to oppose such in-your-face legislation.  Whether my image of a family looks like Ozzie and Harriet or Ozzie and Harry is entirely between me and my maker.  What I believe, and what I wish to teach my children to believe, is of no concern to a conservative government.  The State legitimately seeks to limit acceptable behavior, but should never seek to limit acceptable thought, which is precisely what this legislation aims to do.  

Its promoters would have us believe that its purpose is to protect a vulnerable minority from aggression by the majority – an aim that may reasonably be undertaken by government, and which is in fact already insured by existing law.  But it oversteps this goal by leaps and bounds.  

Rather than protecting actual individuals from specific discrimination or aggression, it prescribes the promulgation of hypothetical “lifestyle choices” to the point that to neglect to equally represent every conceivable permutation of such a “choice” is tantamount to discriminating against it.  

The same logic leads us inevitably to the conclusion that the government discriminates against Christians, but we have yet to see any such legislation designed to protect their lifestyle choices or their sensibilities.  

In their quest to reconfigure society according to anyone’s whim, liberals will foist upon us by law what they cannot convince us of by argument. George Orwell’s Thought Police had nothing on State Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) or Assemblymembers Lloyd Levine (D-Van Nuys) and John Laird (D-Santa Cruz).

How ungrateful we are!  Liberals go through all the trouble of coming up with ways to save us from ourselves, and we stubbornly refuse to fall in line.

Health care bloggers Vito Grasso and Elizabeth Swain have been interrupted from rubbing their hands together at the prospect of a Democrat achieving the “moral imperative” of universal health care coverage by their worry that people still won’t be served due to a shortage of primary care physicians. They have alerted Huffington Post readers to an alarming statistic:  24% of Medicare patients (fully insured by the federal government) cannot find a doctor to treat them.

Their solution: “universal access.” (Liberalspeak for: “How we try to force people to become government-employed doctors).

It seems that people are not lining up to fill the government slots on offer.  Mr. Grasso and Ms. Swain offer two (they boil down to one) reasons for this puzzling situation.  Low reimbursement rates (the government doesn’t spend enough, and physicians are greedy), and better pay in specialties (hit the greedy doctors again).

It is truly vexing when people reject or ignore liberal plans for their betterment.

Despite the moral imperative, people don’t seem that enthusiastic about investing an average of 10 years of preparation and indebting themselves well into 6 figures to serve as government filters for health care.  Go figure.

Of course, all of these obstacles could be flattened out if only everyone would sit still in their government schools and be educated in the liberal faith.  (See Dinesh D’Souza's "Athiest Indoctrination Project")

But in another unforseen rebellion, some people are opting out – insisting on religious schools or even…home schooling.  This wave of obstinacy is so shocking to liberal sensibilities that Christiane Amanpour felt compelled to alert her notoriously impartial CNN audience to the dangerous nonconformists in their midst in the Christian segment of her transparently anti-religious “God’s Warriors” series.  She closed the three-part series by warning her viewers that religious people “are certain they know how to make the world right.  We cannot and should not ignore them.”

Though many of us instinctively duck when liberals start throwing around terms like “moral imperative,” we’d best look up and pay attention to what they come up with to combat our lack of cooperation. As Ms. Amanpour projected onto the religious, liberals “are certain they know how to make the world right. "  If only it weren't for those pesky obstacles.

Expanding on the football metaphor columnist Frank Pastore A Question of Strategy for Pro-Lifers used last week to discuss the abortion wars, the pro-life side is never going to win the season if we’re going to play every game on the other guys’ turf.

If the other side is ahead in this game, it is largely because it has defined the terms of play. When we allow abortion advocates to frame the debate by casting themselves as defenders of freedom – hence their preferred term “pro-choice”, we give them home field advantage. If they are “for” good things like choice and freedom, we must be “against” these good things.  The crowd is primed to boo us, and we lose the coin toss every time.

If we would all come out of the first defensive huddle having pledged never again to repeat the misleading and nonsensical term “pro-choice,” we’d be well on our way to regaining possession of the ball.

An offensive strategy would call things as they are, would accept no euphemisms, would challenge anyone who said she supported “a woman’s right to choose” to define exactly what she might choose.  “To choose what?”  would be our favorite question. People are eager to proclaim themselves advocates of choice, but bristle when pressed for details.

In the opponent’s playbook are any number of terms and phrases designed to mislead. Applying adjectives to the word abortion clouds the issue. “Medical” abortions fix the attention on the woman rather than on the child.  The mother simply undergoes a medical procedure. What the term actually denotes is that the death of the fetus is intentional (as opposed to spontaneous). “Therapeutic” abortions sound medically necessary, but really just mean the death of the fetus desired by the mother for some reason other than mere whim.   The term “selective reduction” denotes care (selecting), and correcting excess (what must be reduced was excessive), when it means choosing which unwanted humans to kill while sparing others.  To avoid the term abortion altogether they refer to the “interruption” or “termination” of pregnancies.  Interruption is a bogus concept, as there is no resuming a life snuffed out.  At least termination is more honest, though the focus on the word “pregnancy” deflects attention from the human person who is terminated.

But no matter how they phrase it, people who say they support “choice” support the choice of when and how to kill innocent human beings. We should insist that they recognize this. At the very least, we should require them to finish their sentences (Right to choose what?).

If we legitimately call efforts to protect human life from aggression at any stage the “pro-life” movement, why don’t we refer to efforts to foster lethal aggression as the “pro-death” movement?  Well, because its members may be wrongheaded, but they are not stupid.

They know that those “pro-bashing-in-the-skull-of-defenseless-babies” t-shirts and bumper-stickers would be a bit harder to sell than their innocuous “pro-choice” and “protect women’s health” propaganda.

What can we call this group instead?  At the very least the "pro-abortion" movement.  I would turn one of their own euphemisms against them and call them the “terminators,” but I fear they might actually like the tough Hollywood ring it has to it.

Let’s insist on home field advantage. We must assure a win.
A Question of Strategy for Pro-Lifers

If you enjoy being ridiculed by liberals, try objecting to one of their foolhardy social engineering projects on the grounds that it will lead by a “slippery slope” to something that even they might reject.

The only slippery slope they have ever heard of is the one where if you teach abstinence in sex-ed programs, everyone will die of AIDS within the week.

Maybe this week’s news can wake a few of them up to reality.  On Monday alone, and just in New York, we were treated to the news of a teenage boy allegedly murdering his infant daughter (after having given away or sold her clothes, said the neighbors; She arrived DOA in a diaper), and a Queens woman selling her newborn to, thank God - or at least the NYPD – an under cover police officer.  This, one day after news reached the States of a pair of Chilean teenagers offering their as yet unborn child up for sale on the internet on a website called “quebarato” – how cheap.  Indeed.

How cheap is young life?  Most of the comments posted on Chilean blogs about the Internet sale lamented the ignorance of the teenagers.  If they had only known about contraception or the morning-after pill they wouldn’t have had to get themselves into such a jam.  

But there were plenty of things they weren’t ignorant of. Even a thousand kilometers south of the capital in a developing nation, sixteen-year-olds know that a baby cuts into your partying.  Besides, they wanted to buy a car.  This is what the young father had to say for his actions.  

How does a boy develop such a moral hierarchy – putting stepping out above stepping up?  If you believed in a slippery slope, you might cite the influence of “pop culture:” television, movies, music, videos, games and advertisements that celebrate superficial pleasure as an end in itself.  You might notice that the beautiful young people on our screens satisfy all their whims and pay no cost.  But since that whole philosophy is just something conservatives drag out to stymie progressive ideas, it couldn’t have affected this young man, could it have?  

Some of the newscasters who alerted us to these sad cases expressed shock and disgust at what had happened.  They must have felt sure that their listeners would feel likewise.  And surely anyone would.  But why should we be shocked if some people take to its logical end the instrumentalization of human beings that is everywhere around us?  If the law allows a girl to kill her unborn child, mightn’t she reasonably think that she does him a favor by merely selling him?  

Was it such a stretch of the imagination for these people to think of their children as merchandise?  Babies have been treated as consumer goods for some time now.  Everyone has a right to one but no one has a duty to one.  Anatomy be damned.  Having progressively accepted abortion in all its many guises, and the myriad manipulations of the human person from the Petri dish to the custody court to the hospice bed, it is disingenuous to claim now that we never meant for it to come to this.

We can hardly remember when we took the first step. Such is the slippery slope:  it is hard to get one’s footing and look back uphill.  Go ahead: laugh.